According to Walter Kaiser, although there have been critics of early iron production, one may still demonstrate that knowledge of working in terrestrial iron existed long before the so-called Iron Age that typically is dated as beginning somewhere around 1200 B.C.
Lloyd Bailey argued that the reference to iron in the story of Cain’s relatives necessitated the conclusion that it was not reliable. The fact that Genesis 4:22 depicted Tubal-Cain as one who “forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron” clearly violated our modern conventions that had assigned the onset of the iron age at 1200 B.C. How could smelting of metals have been achieved in a mere seven generation period from the first appearance of humans on the earth? asked Bailey. The earliest evidence for working in crude iron that he would grant was that done by the Hittites in 1500 B.C.
Actually, evidence now exists to demonstrate that many of the skills for working in various arts and crafts were known, lost, rediscovered and lost once again only to be found by a later generation. The fact that the Hebrew word for “iron,” barzel , is probably a loan word from the early Sumerians who lived in the Mesopotamian valley in the latter part of the fourth and early third millennium should have given us reason for pause. The Sumerian word for “iron” was parzillum , which easily could explain the Hebrew barzel by the labial “b” and “p” interchange minus the case ending of -um (which Hebrew has dropped) and the doubling of the final “l” that is only needed in Sumerian. The Hebrew word for iron, then, was known and used already more than two and a half millennia before the official start of what we later called our Iron Age in 1200 B.C. Several other finds have added to the importance of this fact. Therefore, it would be premature to conclude that working in terrestrial iron was impossible prior to our dating of the Iron Age. [Water C. Kaiser Jr., The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable & Relevant?, pp. 68-69]